# lobotomy
## English
### Etymology

From lobe +‎ -otomy.

### Pronunciation

* (UK) IPA: /ləˈbɒt.ə.mi/
* Audio (Southern England):(file)
* (US) IPA: /ləˈbɑː.tə.mi/
* Rhymes: -ɒtəmi

### Noun

lobotomy (countable and uncountable, plural lobotomies)
* A surgical operation on the frontal lobe of the brain intent on treating certain mental illnesses.
** 2007, Julie Albrecht Royce, Traveling Michigan's Sunset Coast, Dog Ear Publishing, published 2007, →ISBN, page 420:They existed at a time in history when shock therapy, brain tissue manipulation, implants, drug experimentation and lobotomies were treatments de jour.
* The severing of the prefrontal cortex from the thalamic region of the brain.
* The severing of the sympathetic nerve trunk.
* (figurative) Separation, removal or deprivation.
** 1992, Anthony Magistrale, editor, A Casebook on The Stand, Starmont House, page 135:Yet this conscience is a deep part of the soul; to silence it, characters must perform a kind of moral lobotomy, excising the best parts of themselves, until what is left becomes less than human.
** 1998, Megan Crawford, Richard Edwards, Lesley Kidd, editors, Taking Issue: Debates in Guidance and Counselling in Learning, Routledge, page 51:Organisations which set out to treat all individuals as the same, or are ‘colour-blind’ in their philosophy, could be said to impose a form of cultural lobotomy on their clients, in denying the additional skills, knowledge and experience that they have as members of a minority culture.
** 2002 October, Ron Elsdon, Affiliation in the Workplace: Value Creation in the New Organization, ABC-Clio, page 21:Put another way, how can we avoid an ethical lobotomy in establishing an organizational perspective?
** 2018 January, David Resnick, Representing Education in Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings, and Issues, Palgrave Macmillan US, page 13:In the end, as Levinson feared, the price of Charlie being accepted into normative school society is a kind of social lobotomy: he is tamed, so he is not really Charlie anymore.
** 2018 March, Leo Zaibert, Rethinking Punishment, Cambridge University Press, page 74:From Tadros’s perspective — the perspective of classical utilitarianism — there is nothing objectionable about this moral lobotomy whereby a wrongdoer pops a moral anesthetic pill immediately after committing whatever atrocity one could imagine in order to avoid suffering — provided, that is, that she would “understand” the wrongness of her actions.
** 2019 March [1996], Jeanne Daly, Ethical Intersections: Health Research, Methods And Researcher Responsibility, Taylor & Francis, page 200:We might be able to offer some sort of mental rehabilitation for clinicians who suffer from this type of intellectual lobotomy.
** 2019 June, Paul Wassmann, The Hidden Pathways of Germanic Mythology: On the Neglected, Demonized, Repulsed and Repressed Archetypical Representations of Original Germanic Culture, Chiron Publications, page 295:For the surviving generations, in particular the post-World War II generation and their children, a time of cultural lobotomy began, accompanied by a fundamental sense of shame for the abuse carried out in the name of the nation.
** 2019 December, Lou Turner, Helen Neville, editors, Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work: Practicing Internationally with Marginalized Communities, Taylor & Francis, page 67:The offender’s acceptance of his condemnation presupposes the coherent ensemble of collective consciousness of a specific ethical universe; that is, for an offender to recognize his act as criminal before a judge is to disapprove of the act and to negate his rupture of the public sphere by his private conduct. The North African refuses this ethical lobotomy by denial and retraction of his confession.
** 2020 September, Dana Villa, Socratic Citizenship, Princeton University Press, page 302:It is as if civic engagement required a moral-intellectual lobotomy, the better to overcome doubts about the inherent goodness of the community, the moral worth of a given group identity, or the value of specific ideological commitment.

#### Synonyms

* leucotomy

#### Derived terms

* ice-pick lobotomy
* lobotomist
* lobotomite
* lobotomize